Difficult Family

There is an unspoken agreement between the racially divided towns of Bayside and Hamilton: no one steps over the train tracks that divide them. Or else. Not until Zach Whitman anyway, a white boy who moves in from Philly and who dreams of music. When he follows his dream across the tracks to meet his idol, the famous jazz musician who owns The Sunlight Record Shop in Hamilton, he’s flung into Capri Collins’s path.

Seventeen-year-old Amelia Gannon (just "Gannon" to her friends) is invisible to almost everyone in her life. To her parents, to her teachers - even her best friend, who is more interested in bumming cigarettes than bonding. Some days the only way Gannon knows she is real is by carving bloody lines into the flesh of her stomach. Then she meets Michael Brooks, and for the first time she feels like she is being seen to the core of her being.

Cage York has to choose between a love of the game and a love of the girl in this sultry Sea Breeze novel from New York Times best-selling author Abbi Glines. After waiting for his big break, bad boy Cage York is finally called up to prove his worth in the college baseball arena. But when Cage's girlfriend, Eva, mourns the sudden loss of her father, it's not Cage's comforting arms she runs to, but those of her former fiancé's twin brother, Jeremy. Torn between his baseball dream and the girl of his dreams, Cage must prove he's worthy of Eva's love, or risk losing her to Jeremy forever.

Love - good and bad - forces three teens' worlds to tilt in a riveting standalone novel from #1 New York Timesbest-selling author Ellen Hopkins. Three teens, three stories - all interconnected through their parents' family relationships. As the adults pull away, caught up in their own dilemmas, the worlds of the teens begin to tilt.

Junie Kim just wants to fit in. So she keeps her head down and tries not to draw attention to herself. But when racist graffiti appears at her middle school, Junie must decide between staying silent or speaking out. Then Junie’s history teacher assigns a project and Junie decides to interview her grandparents, learning about their unbelievable experiences as kids during the Korean War. Junie comes to admire her grandma’s fierce determination to overcome impossible odds, and her grandpa’s unwavering compassion during wartime.

Sixteen-year-old Petula de Wilde is anything but wild. A former crafting fiend with a happy life, Petula shut herself off from the world after a family tragedy. She sees danger in all the ordinary things, like crossing the street, a bug bite, or a germy handshake. She knows: Life is out to get you. The worst part of her week is her comically lame mandatory art therapy class with a small group of fellow misfits. Then a new boy, Jacob, appears at school and in her therapy group.

Tennyson: Don’t get me started on the Bruiser. He was voted “Most Likely to Get the Death Penalty” by the entire school. He’s the kid no one knows, no one talks to, and everyone hears disturbing rumors about. So why is my sister, Brontë, dating him? One of these days she’s going to take in the wrong stray dog, and it’s not going to end well.BronteMy brother has no right to talk about Brewster that way — no right to threaten him. There’s a reason why Brewster can’t have friends — why he can’t care about too many people.

Twelve-year-old Dani is running away from home - or what’s left of home anyway. Her older brother, who had muscular dystrophy, died a few months ago. Then her father left and her parents got divorced. Now home is just Dani and her sad, silent mother, and Dani’s got to get away. She plans to do something amazing, and go where her parents will never find her: She’s going to hike the whole Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine. The trail is a legend in her family, the place where her parents met, fell in love, and got married 14 years before.

Beth’s life hasn’t been the same since her sister died. Her parents try to lock her down, believing they can keep her safe by monitoring her every move. When Beth sneaks out to a party one night and meets the new guy in town, Chase, she’s thrilled to make a secret friend. It seems a small thing, just for her. Only Beth doesn’t know how big her secret really is....

Eighteen-year-old Finley Sinclair is witty, tough, talented, and driven. With an upcoming interview at the Manhattan music conservatory, she just needs to finish composing her audition piece. But her creativity disappeared with the death of her older brother, Will. She decides to take a break and study abroad, following Will’s travel journal to Ireland. Her brother felt closest to God there, and she hopes to find peace about his death. Meanwhile, Beckett Rush - teen heartthrob and Hollywood bad boy - is flying to Ireland to finish filming his latest vampire movie.

It's 1944, and World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific. The war seemed far away from Margot in Iowa and Haruko in Colorado—until they were uprooted to dusty Texas, all because of the places their parents once called home: Germany and Japan. Haruko and Margot meet at the high school in Crystal City, a "family internment camp" for those accused of colluding with the enemy. The teens discover that they are polar opposites in so many ways, except for one that seems to override all the others: the camp is changing them, day by day and piece by piece.

Ollie and Moritz are two teenagers who will never meet. Each of them lives with a life-affecting illness. Contact with electricity sends Ollie into debilitating seizures while Moritz has a heart defect and is kept alive by an electronic pacemaker. If they did meet, Ollie would seize, but turning off the pacemaker would kill Moritz. Through an exchange of letters, the two boys develop a strong bond of friendship that becomes a lifeline during dark times.

The troublemaker. The overachiever. The cheer captain. The dead girl. Like every high school in America, Jefferson-Lorne High contains all of the above. After the shocking murder of senior Emma Baines, three of her classmates are at the top of the suspect list: Claude, the notorious partier; Avery, the head cheerleader; and Gwen, the would-be valedictorian. But appearances are never what they seem. And the truth behind what really happened to Emma may just be lying in plain sight. As long buried secrets come to light, the clock is ticking to find Emma's killer.

Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated polygamous community without questioning her father's three wives and her twenty brothers and sisters. Or at least without questioning them much—if you don't count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that Kyra must marry her 60-year-old uncle—who already has six wives—Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family.

Olivia Schwartz has a plan. It’s even color-coded. And the plan is this: a perfect SAT score, a prestigious college, and a straight path towards her dream of becoming a doctor. The last thing she wants to do—the summer before her senior year of high school, no less—is go on a cruise. Especially with her parents, younger brothers, and all the unspoken things between them since her older brother’s death so many years ago. Then Olivia meets Sebastian. He’s everything she’s not: charming, exciting, willing to take risks and run with them. For the first time, Olivia feels like she can have fun.

Since the day her mother died, Jem has known about the numbers. Numbers that pop into her head when she looks into someone’s eyes. They’re dates, the numbers. Dates predicting with brute accuracy each person’s death. Burdened by such grim knowledge, Jem avoids relationships. Until she meets Spider, another outsider, and takes a chance. Maybe they can find happiness together, if only in the brief time that remains before his expiration date.

Lizzie St. Claire wants to be invisible. Forced to move out of her home, she and her mom now live in a transitional housing shelter, Good Hope, until they can get back on their feet. She just wants to keep her head down at Good Hope and her new school so that she doesn’t have to admit the real reason she and her mom lost everything. But at the nearby Birchwood Stables, some new friends - along with the arrival of a frightened pony named Fire - help Lizzie to open up and accept help from those around her, even if it means she’ll have more to lose if things change again.

Prince Jones is the guy with all the answers—or so it seems. After all, at seventeen, he has his own segment on Detroit’s popular hip-hop show, Love Radio, where he dishes out advice to the brokenhearted. Prince has always dreamed of becoming a DJ and falling in love. But being the main caretaker for his mother, who has multiple sclerosis, and his little brother means his dreams will stay just that and the only romances in his life are the ones he hears about from his listeners. Until he meets Dani Ford.

A lonely Vernon, whose mother has recently died, finds himself befriended by the least likely of duos - the neighborhood outcasts that used to be the subject of his and his buddies' ridicule in this 1994 Newbery Honor Book.

When Emma Sasha Silver loses her eyesight in a nightmare accident, she must relearn everything from walking across the street to recognizing her own sisters to imagining colors. One of seven children, Emma used to be the invisible kid, but now it seems everyone is watching her. And just as she's about to start high school and try to recover her friendships and former life, one of her classmates is found dead in an apparent suicide. Fifteen and blind, Emma has to untangle what happened and why - in order to see for herself what makes life worth living.